Monday, 24 January 2011

Apress, as I expect you know, publish some really good SQL Server books. Some of which are on the MCM reading list. Each day Apress offer an ebook from it’s catalogue for a bargain basement price of $10 in its Deal of the Day. (About £6.50). If you catch it on the right day you can pick up an absolute bargain. Through this offer I recently bought Grant Fritchey’s (Blog|@scraydba) SQL Server Query Performance Tuning Distilled. This is on the MCM reading list. I’d happily have paid the full fee for this book. I’m half way through it and I’ve learned a great deal already.

This is just a short post for Monday, I haven’t posted for a while I’d thought I dust of the blog and let you know about the possible deals you can get over at Apress.

Monday, 17 January 2011

Back in November, I was lucky enough to be nominated and then got enough votes to win the New to SQLServerPedia category in the SQLServerPedia.com’s inaugural blogger awards. Quest sent all those nominated a nice prize pack of notepad, pen, T-shirt and best of all some “BuckyBalls” which was a pretty cool prize in it’s own right. The winners of the respective categories also got an additional gift or trophy. And here’s mine. It arrived this morning, I was out but the UPS guy left it with my neighbour who had the honour of presenting it to me, here it is.

Tuesday, 4 January 2011

There was an interesting question posted on a forum recently, asking how can you tell which sqlservr.exe process (shown in task manager) is mapped to which specific instance of SQL Server running on a server, if you have a multi-instance server and the account running each separate SQL Service is the same. I won’t go into the details of the post, but I thought the answer worth of a post of my own. As with most things in SQL Server there is more than one way to obtain this information.

Let’s assume that you, like me, have two instances running on you server: when you go to task manager you will see two sqlservr.exe processes listed under the processes tab

The first thing that I would do is add a column called PID to this view. Select <View> <Select Columns…> from the toolbar menu. Select the PID (Process Identifier) column checkbox and select <OK>

This will give you the process ID of each process running on your machine and displayed in task manager including your two sqlservr.exe processes.

Now you have the process id of each process you can either:

Open up SQL Configuration Manager

On the SQL Services tab right click on the SQL instance that you want to match up to a process

Select <Properties> and click the <Services> tab

On the general tab you should see a process id property

The other alternative, is to connect to each instance in SSMS (Management Studio) and open the SQL Server log. When the service starts up it writes the process ID to the SQL Server log. So if you go to the start of your log file you should see an entry similar to the following: